Firefox Channels

Decisions, status updates and next steps on the Firefox rapid release process

Today we are pushing out an automatically downloaded test add-on for Firefox Beta users. The add-on itself does not change the behavior of Firefox in any way, and should be automatically uninstalled in the next week. In the meantime it will, however, be visible in the Add-ons Manager as “Mozilla Firefox hotfix”.

We plan to use this “add-on hotfix” feature to deliver individual fixes to Firefox users between releases. The purpose of this week’s test is to collect metrics that verify the feature is working as expected.

We took the latest code in releases/mozilla-beta and created refreshed updates for our Beta audience to test. Both mobile and desktop versions were refreshed and offered to existing Firefox Beta users as automatic updates. We have posted details about the changes in this version.

We have a release candidate for the next version of Firefox! The most recent Firefox Beta is our release candidate. If no issues are found, this version will be released to all Firefox users on Tuesday, 2011-11-08.

Any issues should be filed in Bugzilla or, if they seem particularly nasty, please feel free to send them to me directly.

Add-on developers

Please update your add-ons for Firefox 8 as soon as possible. We have a curated list of changes you need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network.

Thank you very much for your heroic efforts and sticking with us through the new release process. If you have any questions, please feel free to hop on irc.mozilla.org and join the #addons or #developers channel.

Web developers

Test your sites to make sure they still work. We have a curated list of changes you need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network. Please take a look. If you are using feature detection and writing to web standards you should generally be compatible. You should also check out the new web technologies you can play with. Oh look, we now support cross-domain WebGL textures.

Any issues that look to be caused by Firefox should be filed in Bugzilla or, if they seem particularly nasty, please feel free to send them to me directly.

SUMO contributors

Stay vigilant. Please let us know any issues our Firefox Beta users find. Take a look at the curated list of changes you might need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network. Take a look at the bugs we are still tracking and see if you think any of them will become an issue when we release to everyone.

Enterprise deployments

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. If you hopped on the new release process train please take a look at the curated list of changes you might need to be aware of on the Mozilla Developer Network. If you are still hanging out on Firefox 3.6, don’t fret! We will be releasing an update for Firefox 3.6 (hopefully) at the same time as we release this version, Tuesday, 2011-11-08. The new Firefox 3.6 version (currently called Firefox 3.6.24) will contain backports of the important security fixes in Firefox 8.

Our discussions on the Enterprise Working Group have told us you don’t generally qualify point releases. If you do you need to qualify this Firefox 3.6 security and stability update you can grab it from our ftp server. Also, be sure to check out our new proposal on how we might adjust the release process to accommodate your unique needs.

Firefox developers

There is more work to be done, but thanks for all you have done so far. Keep working on Firefox Nightly to make future versions of Firefox the best they can be, but take a moment to step back and revel in the fact that your amazing engineering ships to users in less than 1.5 years. Your work is making the web better not only for Firefox users, but for everyone.

Localizers

Sit back and relax. Soon we will be migrating mozilla-central to mozilla-aurora and you will have new UI and strings to play with, but for now bask in the hard work you have already done preparing to ship to hundreds of millions of people. We hope the predictability and consistency of the new release process has made your work easier and less stressful. Thanks so much for your hard work!

Firefox users

Hold tight! The courageous Firefox Beta testers are making sure everything works silky smooth for you. Once we get feedback from them you will have a great new version of Firefox delivered to your computer in the next week!

We took the latest code in releases/mozilla-beta and created refreshed updates for our Beta audience to test. Both mobile and desktop versions were refreshed and offered to existing Firefox Beta users as automatic updates.

We took the latest code in releases/mozilla-beta and created refreshed updates for our Beta audience to test. Both mobile and desktop versions were refreshed and offered to existing Firefox Beta users as automatic updates.

We took the latest code in releases/mozilla-beta and created refreshed updates for our Beta audience to test. Both mobile and desktop versions were refreshed and offered to existing Firefox Beta users as automatic updates.